That Face
We flew up higher than the birds—so high the clouds hung right before our eyes—and from beside my ribs came the sound of someone lost in awe.
"Woooooow....."
Unlike last night, when darkness had swallowed everything in every direction and all we could see were explosions, the jungle by daylight was a truly magnificent sight. Perhaps that was why Dang Giyeong could do nothing but spout one awed little noise after another—ooh this and aah that.
In any case, the reason we were flying at such an altitude was that those men might catch wise to the pursuit and divert somewhere other than the Beast Palace...
"At this height, they'd never even dream that someone's on their tail, right?"
"Well, if it were me, I certainly couldn't have imagined it."
My eyes could pick out anything person-sized the instant it entered my field of vision, so the two of us stayed tucked inside the clouds as we tailed them. Of course, the first time we slipped into those clouds...
"Young Master! Ahead! We're gonna cra—... oh, we're not?"
That fool Giyeong had bellowed himself hoarse like a ten-year-old terrified of bumping into a cloud, and my eardrums were still ringing for it.
Had he actually thrashed around, I'd have simply trussed him up and hauled him along... The thought had barely finished forming when I was already, quite casually, spinning a chain out of blood.
"Dushik."
"Yes?"
"Ever heard of skydiving?"
"Sky... what? I have no idea what that is?"
"It's a fun thing you do from way up in the sky. Want to try?"
"Young Master, whenever you make that particular face, it usually..."
"Usually... what?"
"...it usually turns out not to be fun at all. May I respectfully decline?"
Well, look who'd learned to read the room. As he refused in a voice trembling like a leaf, I flashed him my most vicious smile and replied.
"Nope. I only recommend things that are fun. Let's try it first and decide after."
And with those words, I released the strength my left arm had been holding him with...
"It's not fu—blbbbghhh!!!"
Dushik began his vertical plunge without even managing a proper scream. His mouth had been hanging open the entire time, it seemed, because his cheeks rippled wildly, loosing one bizarre noise after another as he dropped through the open sky.
But surely you didn't think I'd done it to kill him.
Shrrrraaaak-
A chain of blood shot from my right hand and coiled around his waist.
"Gack!"
Having failed to account for the momentum, Dushik was snatched mid-fall with his spine bent into a work of art, and reeled back up dangling limp as a wet rag.
What was that saying again—a frog struck dead by a stone thrown in jest? Watching Dushik, whom I'd tossed out in pure fun, come dangling back up with his back folded like origami, I panicked and shouted...
"Dushik!!!"
"Ugh, damn it... hey, you son of a bitch!"
A double serving of curses came right back at me.
While two warriors of the Dang Clan squabbled in the heavens...
Maeng Sik and company, having run themselves half to death, were gasping with their breath caught at the very bottom of their throats.
"Haa... haa... let's rest for just a bit."
Fortunately, there was no sign of anything pursuing them, so they caught their breath on their knees. Maeng Sik, a Transcendent Realm martial artist such as he was, had more breathing room than the rest, and he swept his gaze around, taking stock of their surroundings—
"...................."
The jungle was utterly silent.
"Haa... so nothing's following us?"
If they had been, he was fully prepared—tears and all—to sacrifice his friends for the greater good. So was he supposed to call this a blessing...?
No... a blessing it was. If that monster had pressed the pursuit, sacrifice or no sacrifice, every last one of them would have been hunted down and killed.
"Thank you, O gods."
Having blown another kiss of gratitude to the deity he worshiped, he returned to his spot—whereupon one of his friends looked up at him with naked curiosity and asked:
"But why did we suddenly start running? And why were you shrieking like a madman with your face gone white as a sheet? Come on, give us a reason."
How on earth was he supposed to explain this one...
Of course, none of them had believed the story he'd told back in the village. Still, a story had been told. Was it time to come clean?
After a moment spent weighing his dignity against the truth, Maeng Sik heaved a deep sigh and spoke.
"You remember how I said I barely escaped some monster of a man?"
"What... that story from the village yesterday? The one where you yelled once and lightning came crashing down?"
"The lightning part was true... Anyway, the thing standing in that crater—that was the monster."
At that, the friend who'd asked broke into a sneer.
"He was human, wasn't he? Just a strong one, that's all. Then you could have talked things through. You absolutely had to bolt on sight?"
Seriously, how was he supposed to explain this...
Maeng Sik wracked his brains for a moment, then spoke slowly.
"One flick of that man's hand, and blood-red monsters come crawling out to tear people limb from limb. You still want to call that human?"
"Well, that's..."
"Fine. Conceding a hundred points, let's call it martial arts. So then—what realm do you think the man is at?"
".........."
"Transcendent Realm? If that were it, I wouldn't have been running with everything pouring out of both ends."
The truth was, back then it hadn't been only tears and snot streaming down—things had gotten thoroughly damp down below as well.
"Then the Profound Realm? Some foreign swordsman who looks barely twenty—you think he's Profound Realm?"
With the friend he'd snapped at gone silent, Maeng Sik clawed at his own hair and pressed on.
"So what's left? There are only two options. Either someone who reached the Realm of Life and Death reversed his years into a young body... or that thing was never human to begin with..."
While the one who'd sneered clamped his mouth shut, another friend chimed in.
"If that's the case, couldn't you have just asked him for help...?"
But what came out of his mouth was utter nonsense...
"Help? Like hell he'd help. That guy shredded every last warrior of the palace the moment he laid eyes on them."
"Still..."
"Then by all means, turn around right now and go ask him yourself."
".........."
The more they talked, the heavier the air grew, and Maeng Sik spoke in a deflated voice.
"If we've rested enough, we're heading back to the palace."
And with that, they set off once more.
"Young Master, they're on the move again."
"Then so are we."
At Dang Giyeong's words—still dangling limp from the chain—I resumed flying forward.
"Dushik, by the way—you'd never pull a stunt as idiotic as theirs, would you?"
"Hm? Whatever do you mean... Ah. Of course. I would never do anything so utterly moronic. Who in their right mind drags their own pursuers along and, like lunatics, heads straight for their secret hideout?"
Had the phrase "collective intelligence" been coined for nothing? With that many heads between them, had those men genuinely failed to grasp that they might be exposing the Beast Palace's location?
"Either way, with empty skulls like those, this makes my life easy."
Before long, I was smirking down at the sizable village visible in the far distance. That is, until I confirmed the something I could sense beside it.
"Haa... well, shit."
What in the world was that thing sitting a little apart from the village?
Seen from the sky, it was some unidentifiable mass of pale, whitish jelly.
"Dushik, you see that?"
"You mean the white thing?"
"Yeah. I'm fairly sure that's the culprit behind all of this... We're heading over there first."
I began a slow descent toward it.
As my altitude dropped, the thing proved far vaster than I'd imagined. Perhaps flying that high had thrown off my sense of perspective. Up close, it was practically...
"Young Master, at this point it's nearly the size of the clan's main estate, isn't it?"
He wasn't wrong. It was something like a jellyfish, roughly as large as the Sichuan Dang Clan compound itself.
At the sight of that colossal, translucent jellyfish floating in midair, I could only knit my brow...
"So that's why they didn't bother taking the children."
Countless clusters of tentacles were embedded in the villagers' heads, seemingly siphoning something out of them. Judging by their expressions—slack-jawed and glassy-eyed, like they'd been drugged to the gills—I could only assume that memories and emotions were being drained away.
Which meant the children, with comparatively little in the way of memories or feelings to steal, simply hadn't been worth taking.
The scene made my head swim just from looking at it. Pressing a hand to my forehead, I thought:
'That thing isn't native to this world... so a Calamity, then?'
The likeliest answer was that another one of those beings called Calamities—like Bae Haemu, like me—had fallen into this world...
This dimension wasn't some cosmic junk drawer, so why did things like that keep tumbling through? It wasn't even like Earth, where the fabric of reality had been punched full of holes and every manner of horror came pouring out—so how did only the most dangerous ones keep popping up, one after another?
Still hovering in midair, I raised my right hand, and at some point a blood-red spear had taken shape in my grasp.
"Young Master? That's far too big a—"
"To spear something that big, you use a harpoon that big."
One that was, unlike my usual fare, truly massive and imposing. The spear that materialized was so absurdly long that, planted upright, it would have rivaled the height of a hill...
"Hnngh... so this is my limit?"
I'd drawn out even more power than I had for last night's throw, and my right arm was beginning to shred at the edges. However much strength I'd recovered of late, it was still less than half of what I once commanded—my hand trembled uncontrollably.
But then, surely the same went for that jellyfish bastard. Mikhail had crossed over as nothing more than a bug, and Behemoth hadn't even been a fully grown specimen—there was no way this unidentified thing alone had come through in perfect form.
In any case, once the spear—crammed to bursting with power—was complete, I hurled it straight down...
THWOOOM-
"You...ng Master?"
"Wow... that son of a bitch plays this game dirty as hell."
The spear ripped through the air with a shriek of wind, passed clean through the translucent jellyfish's body, and plunged on into the poor, blameless earth below.
Physical immunity stacked on top of magic immunity—seriously, what was anyone supposed to do with that...
I muttered, utterly dumbfounded.
"Haa... right. It did, after all, manage to wreck an entire dimension. I suppose carrying one trick like this is only to be expected..."
Still, it seemed to have registered that it had come under attack, for its enormous body began to stir...
Psssssshhhh-
From beneath the thing's head, a pale white mist began to seep out.